You've said the real drama since 1776 has been the "relentless
attack of the prosperous few upon the rights of
the restless many." I want to ask you about the "restless many."
Do they hold any cards?
Sure. They've won a lot of victories. The country is a lot more free
than it was two hundred years ago. For one thing, we don't have
slaves. That's a big change. Thomas Jefferson's goal, at the very left-liberal
end of the spectrum, was to create a country "free of blot
or mixture" -- meaning no red Indians, no black people, just good white
Anglo-Saxons. That's what the liberals wanted.
They didn't succeed. They did pretty much get rid of the native population
-- they almost succeeded in "exterminating" them (as they
put it in those days) -- but they couldn't get rid of the black population,
and over time they've had to incorporate them in some fashion
into society.
Freedom of speech has been vastly extended. Women finally received the
franchise 150 years after the revolution. After a very bloody
struggle, workers finally won some rights in the 1930s -- about fifty
years after they did in Europe. (They've been losing them ever
since, but they won them to some extent.)
In many ways large parts of the general population have been integrated
into the system of relative prosperity and relative freedom --
almost always as a result of popular struggle. So the general population
has lots of cards.
That's something that [English philosopher] David Hume pointed out a
couple of centuries ago. In his work on political theory, he
describes the paradox that, in any society, the population submits
to the rulers, even though force is always in the hands of the
governed.
Ultimately the governors, the rulers, can only rule if they control
opinion -- no matter how many guns they have. This is true of the
most despotic societies and the most free, he wrote. If the general
population won't accept things, the rulers are finished.
That underestimates the resources of violence, but expresses important
truths nonetheless. There's a constant battle between people
who refuse to accept domination and injustice and those who are trying
to force people to accept them.
How to break from the system of indoctrination and propaganda? You've
said that it's nearly impossible for
individuals to do anything, that it's much easier and better to
act collectively. What prevents people from
getting associated?
There's a big investment involved. Everybody lives within a cultural
and social framework which has certain values and certain
opportunities. It assigns cost to various kinds of action and benefits
to others. You just live in that -- you can't help it.
We live in a society that assigns benefits to efforts to achieve individual
gain. Let's say I'm the father or mother of a family. What do I
do with my time? I've got 24 hours a day. If I've got children to take
care of, a future to worry about, what do I do?
One thing I can do is try to play up to the boss and see if I can get
a dollar more an hour. Or maybe I can kick somebody in the face
when I walk past them (if not directly then indirectly, by the mechanisms
that are set up within a capitalist society). That's one way.
The other way is to spend my evenings trying to organize other people,
who will then spend their evenings at meetings, go out on a
picket line and carry out a long struggle in which they'll be beaten
up by the police and lose their jobs. Maybe they'll finally get enough
people together so they'll ultimately achieve a gain, which may or
may not be greater than the gain that they tried to achieve by
following the individualist course.
In game theory, this kind of situation is called "prisoner's dilemma."
You can set up things called "games" -- interactions -- in which
each participant will gain more if they work together, but you only
gain if the other person works with you. If the other person is trying
to maximize his or her own gain, you lose.
Let me take a simple case -- driving to work. It would take me longer
to take the subway than to drive to work. If we all took the
subway and put the money into that instead of into roads, we'd all
get there faster by the subway. But we all have to do it. If other
people are going to be driving and I'm taking the subway, then private
transportation is going to be better for the people who are doing
it.
It's only if we all do something a different way that we'll all benefit
a lot more. The costs to you -- an individual -- to work to create the
possibilities to do things together can be severe. It's only if lots
of people begin to do it, and do it seriously, that you get real benefits.
The same has been true of every popular movement that ever existed.
Suppose you were a twenty-year-old black kid at Spelman
College in Atlanta in 1960. You had two choices. One was: "I'll try
to get a job in a business somewhere. Maybe somebody will be
willing to pick a black manager. I'll be properly humble and bow and
scrape. Maybe I'll live in a middle class home."
The other was to join SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
a black civil rights group of the 1960s], in which case
you might get killed. You were certainly going to get beaten and defamed.
It would be a very tough life for a long time. Maybe you'd
finally be able to create enough popular support so that people like
you and your family could live better.
It would be hard to make that second choice, given the alternatives
available. Society is very much structured to try to drive you toward
the individualist alternative. It's a remarkable fact that many young
people took that second choice, suffered for it and helped create a
much better world.
You've noted polls that indicate that 83% of the population regard
the entire economic system as "inherently
unfair." But it doesn't translate into anything.
It can only translate into anything if people do something about it.
That's true whether you're talking about general things -- like the
inherent unfairness of the economic system, which requires revolutionary
change -- or about small things.
Take, say, health insurance. In public, almost nobody calls for a "Canadian-style"
system. (That's the kind of system they have
everywhere in the world -- an efficient, nationally organized public
health system that guarantees health services for everyone and -- if
it's more serious than Canada's system -- also provides preventive
care.)
And yet according to some polls, a majority of the population is in
favor of it anyway, even though they've scarcely heard anybody
advocate it. Does it matter? No. There'll be some kind of insurance
company-based, "managed" health care system -- designed to
ensure that insurance companies and the health corporations they run
will make plenty of money.
There are only two ways we could get the health care that most of the
population wants. There either needs to be a large-scale popular
movement -- which would mean moving towards democracy, and nobody in
power wants that -- or the business community must
decide that it would be good for them. They might do that.
This highly bureaucratized, extremely inefficient system designed for
the benefit of one sector of the private enterprise system happens
to harm other sectors. Auto companies pay more in health benefits here
than they would across the border. They notice that. They may
press for a more efficient system that breaks away from the extreme
inefficiencies and irrationalities of the capitalist-based system.
Excerpts from: What Uncle Sam Really Wants
Copyright © 1993 by Noam Chomsky
In any country, there's some group that has the real power. It's
not a big secret where power is in the United States. It basically lies
in
the hands of the people who determine investment decisions -- what's
produced, what's distributed. They staff the government, by and
large, choose the planners, and set the general conditions for the
doctrinal system.
One of the things they want is a passive, quiescent population. So one
of the things that you can do to make life uncomfortable for them
is not be passive and quiescent. There are lots of ways of doing that.
Even just asking questions can have an important effect.
Demonstrations, writing letters and voting can all be meaningful --
it depends on the situation. But the main point is -- it's got to be
sustained and organized.
If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but
the people in power can live with that. What they can't live
with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organizations that
keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time
and doing it better the next time.
Any system of power, even a fascist dictatorship, is responsive to public
dissidence. It's certainly true in a country like this, where --
fortunately -- the state doesn't have a lot of force to coerce people.
During the Vietnam War, direct resistance to the war was quite
significant, and it was a cost that the government had to pay.
If elections are just something in which some portion of the population
goes and pushes a button every couple of years, they don't
matter. But if the citizens organize to press a position, and pressure
their representatives about it, elections can matter.
Members of the House of Representatives can be influenced much more
easily than senators, and senators somewhat more easily than
the president, who is usually immune. When you get to that level, policy
is decided almost totally by the wealthy and powerful people
who own and manage the country.
But you can organize on a scale that will influence representatives.
You can get them to come to your homes to be yelled at by a group
of neighbors, or you can sit in at their offices -- whatever works
in the circumstances. It can make a difference -- often an important
one.
You can also do your own research. Don't just rely on the conventional
history books and political science texts -- go back to
specialists' monographs and to original sources: national security
memoranda and similar documents. Most good libraries have
reference departments where you can find them.
It does require a bit of effort. Most of the material is junk, and you
have to read a ton of stuff before you find anything good. There are
guides that give you hints about where to look, and sometimes you'll
find references in secondary sources that look intriguing. Often
they're misinterpreted, but they suggest places to search.
It's no big mystery, and it's not intellectually difficult. It involves
some work, but anybody can do it as a spare-time job. And the
results of that research can change people's minds. Real research is
always a collective activity, and its results can make a large
contribution to changing consciousness, increasing insight and understanding,
and leading to constructive action.